Port Bullshit

What a load of crap this is…

So before the White House sent out Karl Rove to signal Thursday that the president is willing to back down on the Dubai ports deal, it dispatched Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England to Capitol Hill to say that the terrorists will win if the U.S. doesn’t do the deal straight away. “The terrorists want our nation to become distrustful,” England told a U.S. Senate committee. “They want us to become paranoid and isolationist, and my view is we cannot allow this to happen. It needs to be just the opposite.” — via The War Room @ Salon.com

Bush was already paranoid and isolationist the minute he decided to go to war rather than letting the UN weapons inspectors do their job in Iraq, completely ignoring anything that was coming out of the UN, completely ignoring any sort of intelligence that didn’t fit his agenda, ‘fixing’ intelligence around the policy, and choosing war over diplomacy.

The only reason Bush wants this ports deal to go through is that it in one way or another involves some of his corporate cronies, not the least of which is Treasury Secretary John Snow. The president’s own brother, Neil Bush, spent a LOT of time in Dubai right after 9/11, and his other brother, Jeb Bush, is the governor of Florida (where one of the ports is located), and even though these two may or may not be at all related to this ports deal, it sure looks a little suspicious.

Talk about paranoid and isolationist, how about all that information the White House is not releasing to the public, or even to the Congress, about the illegal wiretapping, the Cheney energy board meetings, and on and on and on (I could write pages just on THAT topic).

Citing the report of the bipartisan commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, (Sen. Carl) Levin (D-MI) asked whether any CFIUS member had questioned former White House counterterrorism official Richard A. Clarke about his 1999 contacts with UAE officials, when he queried inquired about possible associations with Osama bin Laden. None had.

Levin asked whether any CFIUS member had discussed with the commissioners their conclusion that the United Arab Emirates had become both a valued counterterrorism ally and a persistent counterterrorism problem. None had.

And Levin asked whether any CFIUS member had talked to Clinton administration officials about their unsuccessful efforts to press the United Arab Emirates to cut its ties with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and end flights into Dubai that provided a key transit point for Taliban officials and their terrorist clients. None had.

“Is there not one agency in this government that believes this takeover could affect the national security of the United States?” Levin asked. — via WaPo

Apparently not.

So tell me again how the Bush administration is sooooo sure that this deal is not a threat to national security? Just because Bush says so? And the evidence backing that is… classified, according to Michael Chertoff.

You can’t have it both ways… either there is a reason to fear terrorism at our ports, or there isn’t. For years now, the White House has hyped all the FEAR surrounding terrorism and national security, and then stonewalled Congressional committees attempting to carry out their oversight duties. Administration officials appearing before Senate and House committees have given testimony that was, to put it generously, knowingly misleading. Requests for information have been simply waved away with an invocation of national security.

Federal whistleblower testimony has been officially gagged by the Justice Department in the name of national security. And we’re just supposed to just believe Bush that there is no national security concern about this deal, but we’re not allowed to see why that is, because it’s classified… after this White House’s long tradition of stonewalling, misleading, or just plain ignoring Congress? No. I don’t think so. And I’m glad the Senator from my state had the guts to ask those questions on the record. Too bad he’s also not questioning the foreign control of our other ports, airports, etc. (China, anyone? Germany?)

But this bullshit about anti-arab racism when it comes to this deal… Bush has a lot of gall to even bring that up, considering the TSA’s no-fly list consists almost entirely of racial profiling, the detainees consist almost entirely of people of arab races, and this administration, via Alberto Gonzales, also officially condones indefinite detentions, torture, and extraordinary rendition, even though they denied any of that until the memos began surfacing, and then they defended it up and down the line. So why isn’t any of that considered horribly racist? And why does this administration get away with that?